Fiction: Conspiracy

by Peter Wrenshall  (987654321@hush.ai)

I like to read the articles in 2600, and I thought you might be interested to hear about the time I got hacked.  At least, I think I got hacked.  I am still not entirely sure.

It was my final year of high school, and I had just been made a trustee of the computer room.  Being a trustee was a bit like being a prefect, only instead of herding first years in and out of the canteen, you got to explain to them that they were not allowed to do anything interesting on the computers.  Simple.

"The computers are for coursework only," I'd have to say in my official voice, usually to a bunch of juniors who were swapping pictures of actresses, or trying to install Doom (this is going back some years).  "Huh?" was the usual answer.  Computers were supposed to be fun, right?  Wrong.

"The computers are for coursework only," would repeat slowly, in a voice that sounded like HAL, the homicidal computer from the movie 2001.  Of course, the juniors would complain about it, and I'd patiently agree that the rules were too restrictive.  But in the end, all I could say was that if they wanted to change things, they should go see Roper.

Roper was our IT teacher (IT is like computers, but with all the fun taken out), and in those days having an IT "suite" was a big deal at our little school.  The mayor had performed a little opening ceremony, and the local newspaper took some nice photos of two rows of shiny, unused PCs.  And that was the way Roper wanted to keep it.

Before the headmaster, Henning, had given me the job, Roper had run the place, just him and his part-time IT bod.  Though he dressed like a librarian and looked harmless, Roper strutted around the place like the Kaiser, watching everything out of the corner of his eye.  He hated me being there.  I was intruding on his turf.  He obviously wanted to get back to the good old days when students got an IT education by looking through the meshed fireproof glass in the computer room door.

He kept inventing work for me: filling in usage logs, doing unnecessary backups, and generally being the computer room doorstop.  The official announcements were the worst.  "The computer room will be closing in five minutes," I would have to say, with Roper watching me.  "Please save your work and log off."  Or, my favorite, "Please free up the computers for other people if you are no longer using them."

With an entire computer room at my disposal, I could have been learning all about programming, hardware, hacking, and cracking.  Instead, my real education was getting flushed down the drain.

It wasn't just me who was getting hindered, either.  And on the rare occasion that Roper was absent (usually because of a staff meeting), the place actually got lively.  The various computer geeks who turned up, myself included, started calling it The Lab, as if we were doing serious work.  Several group projects were proposed, the most popular of which was The Great Network Frag, though with Roper lurking around, there was no way we were ever going to be playing network games.  There just didn't seem to be any way to get him to back off.

One day, after about three months of that sort of tedium, I was sitting in R.E. class, staring off into space and quietly wondering what would be the most amusing way to get fired (the idea of decrypting Roper's admin password and then setting it as the screen-saver on every machine was currently winning), when I heard the words "Mr. Roper has a computer program."

I looked up to see everyone talking.  I was going to ask someone what was going on, when one of the lab regulars, James "Mulder" Stanton, passed me a bunch of papers with the words Computer Dating at the top.  Stanton had a cynical expression on his face.  He was our resident conspiracy theorist, hence the nickname.

"Please take a form and pass them on," Mrs. Bloom, our teacher, said.  I looked at the form.  Roper has written a computer dating program?  I wondered.  Without really thinking about what I was doing, I took two sheets, making them look like one, handed the rest to another of the lab rats, Hanlon, then went back to my own form.  There was a list of questions, "Favorite hobby," that sort of thing.  Next to them were check boxes, probably so that the sheets could be scanned, rather than typed in.

Someone asked Bloom what was going on, but she was too nice to tell us straight.  She said something cryptic about the school dance, the plaintext of which was that the school party was nearing, and this year, instead of all the wallflowers dancing with each other, while all the dweebs teased them, Bloom had arranged with Mr. Roper for a computer to allocate dates.  The talk in the classroom got louder.

Well, it was understandable that people were excited.  Nothing like this had ever happened at our school before.  Still, if any teacher would arrange computer dating, it would have to be Bloom.  You'd go into her office and hear kooky new-age folk music playing quietly in the background, and she'd be humming along.  And, since Bloom often chaperoned the school dance, it all made some sort of strange, otherworldly sense, and yet, my spider-sense was tingling.  Something didn't feel right.  I had no idea what.  It just felt odd.

"What do you think?" Hanlon said to Stanton, giving me a grin.  He was trying to get Stanton going off on a paranoid riff, which wasn't hard.  If you sneezed in Stanton's direction, he would tell you about the CIA-common cold connection.  He had an alternative explanation.  He told us that the computer dating could actually be the authorities trying to introduce psychological profiling in schools, to secretly weed out the criminals.

"Sure, Stanton," Hanlon said, winking at me.  "Psychological profiling."

"Just tick 'A' for every answer," Stanton advised us, his face as straight as a poker player's.  You never knew when he was joking.  Hanlon laughed and shook his head, but Stanton lifted up his sheet, and, sure enough, he had already completed his dating form, having ticked the 'A' box all the way down.

"I'm with you, Stanton," I said, raising an eyebrow at Hanlon.  I was just about to tick all A's on one of my sheets, when I heard Holbrook's voice.  Holbrook was a lab hang-about, a warez collector.  He would go on for hours about his latest pirated software, as if buying "Fotoshop" ready-cracked from the computer fair was a major achievement, and his voice was like fingernails scraping on a blackboard.  You just couldn't miss it.  Think spoiled, whiny, future Roper on caffeine, and you are nearly there.

"Haley, what's Claudia's favorite pastime?" Holbrook was saying.  "She doesn't date little boys," came the sneery reply.  But we all knew what Holbrook was referring to.  Claudia Brauer was the girl all the boys wanted to get to know.  How good looking she was you couldn't say, because they don't have words for it.  Shakespeare would probably have got stuck.

I looked up and saw Holbrook giving the girl a scowl, and already my brain was doing the math: Roper + Dating Program = Hack of the Year.  I had just been dreaming about quitting my job, and now here was an opportunity.  If this dating program was Roper's own concoction, then I had found a spectacular resignation letter at last.

"Literature," Holbrook said, answering his own question, and I watch him tick the box on his sheet.  "You've got no hope," added another girl.

That was true, too.  Besides being world-class eye-candy, Brauer was rich and a straight-A student.  We all had no hope.  How she ended up at our school was the subject of much gossip, but Stanton of course had a theory: Daddy Brauer owned half the factories in town, and had made his pile of money playing the small-town-nice-guy card.  And in a town where people sometimes slaved all Saturday just to get an extra fifty notes (no, seriously) in their wage envelope, you can't be blowing ten large per annum just so that your only daughter doesn't have to sit next to the children of your employees and customers.  Nobody is more sensitive about the social hierarchy than the people at the bottom.  Like all of Stanton's theories, this one was slightly nuts, but had enough truth to be arguable.

What if I could hack Roper's dating program and mix everything up, matching all the hotties with all the geeks, and all the wallflowers with all the sports superstars?  I'd claim the "Hack of the Year" trophy, and then some dweeb like Holbrook, who wanted to be the computer room alpha-geek and trustee, would probably squeal to Roper, and, with any luck, he would get me sacked in spectacular style.  I'd be back in the schoolyard at lunchtimes, bored out of my head, but at least I wouldn't have to make any more announcements.

I don't remember what Bloom talked about - probably the spiritual effect of folk music or something - because I was busy brainstorming, trying to come up with a workable plan.  After the lesson ended, Stanton noticed me loitering around outside the classroom, and stopped.

"What's up?" he said.

"Nothing.  I'll see you later."

He gave me a a suspicious look.

"You going to class?"

"Not yet."  I stood there, saying nothing.

"Catch you later," he said.

"Yeah."

"Keep the foo wheels turning."

"Live long and prosper."

He called me a geek, I called him a paranoid, and then he left.  A minute later, Bloom came out of the classroom, carrying the dating forms, and I watched her walk across the yard to her office.  Operation Matchmaker was good to go.

The next lesson was a blur, and by lunch break I still didn't have any definite plan.  I had to get my hands on Roper's program, but had no idea how.  I collected the computer room keys from the admin office and went to my job.  Roper wasn't there yet, so I unlocked the door and then leaned back on my chair and sat thinking about how to hack into his database dating-base.  That was the tough bit.  Had I been a master hacker, I'd have simply navigated the network and twiddled the relevant bytes: All your computer-dating are belong to me.

But the database obviously wasn't on the student network.  I tried the few tricks that I knew in those days, looked for suspicious file-shares, and poked around the restricted area of the school's one server where I was allowed to go.  But I, obviously, got nowhere.  Reading Stanton's 2600 doesn't make you a computer security expert.  Being young and stupid, I had simply gotten excited about the idea, but reality quickly set in.

"It probably contains new data encryption algorithms," said a little voice in my head.  "You'll never get in there."  I had definitely been watching too many movies.  By the time the last bell was gonging, I had given up the idea.  It was a neat hack, but impossible is impossible.  There was no way it was ever going to happen.  Even so, I figured that there were a couple of days before those forms were scanned into the computer.  And I couldn't see any reason not to at least check it out...

I still had my blank dating form hiding in the pages of my R.E. book.  Maybe I could do something with that.  But the forms were locked in Bloom's office, or she might have handed them to Roper already.  More likely, they were in the admin office already.  Even if knew that for sure, I'd still need a distraction to buy myself some time to make the required adjustments.  What if I set off the fire alarm, and quietly slipped into the office? But some other kid had done that for a prank the year before, and Henning had actually called the cops on him.

After locking up, I took the computer room keys over to the office.  This was another one of Roper's rules.  Don't walk around the school with the keys; you might lose them.

I knocked, but there was no answer, and for a tense moment I thought that the place was empty.  The admin bod who worked in the office was a middle-aged woman, fond of beige polyester, who never smiled.  I found out by deliberate accident one day that she sometimes left the office door unlocked when she was delivering the mail.

My pulse quickened as I thought about opening the door and looking for the forms.  Risky?  Yes.  Stupid?  True.  Dangerous?  Definitely.  In those days, they had just started jailing kids for hacking, and were still making a public example of them.  They got to spend quality time in jail.  I stuck my ear near to the door and listened.  It was quiet.  Suddenly, the door opened and I jumped back, and tried to hide my disappointment as I handed over the keys.

Maybe, I thought, Henning was right when he gave me that lecture about the meaning of the word trustee, and about acting responsibly.  Maybe it was time for me to stop goofing around.  I had to knuckle down and pass some exams.  After all, I had almost no options when I left school next year.  The only person in my family ever to go on to further education was Uncle Norman, who had graduated from truck driving school with honors.  I was fated to end up in the local factory, making cardboard boxes, with the rest of my relatives.  I couldn't afford to mess around any more.  Best to hit the ground running, and try to reach escape velocity.  Goodbye little town.

So when the next day came, I went about my work with a renewed diligence.  I helped a first year to print his Word document.  I chatted with Logan, one of the lab lamers, about which was the best anti-virus program.  Then I helped one of the arts teachers to check her new multimedia disk.  After that, I helped Ann Vale, a regular to the lab, to understand the Sum function on her spreadsheet (no, seriously).  At the end of lunch, I announced that the computer room was about to close, so please save your work and log off, and proceed quietly to the exit and go away.

It was a good day's work, I told myself, thinking of how I could use these skills when I left school to actually earn some money.  But not long afterwards, I found myself loitering with intent outside the office, listening to the silence.  And again, as I stood listening to the silence, Mrs. Polyester answered the door.

On the third day, I told myself that the forms would have probably already been processed, and that at least I'd tried.  But when I knocked on the door, and nobody answered, the idea again returned.  I listened to the silence and looked around.  The place was deserted.  I waited some more.  After a minute, I knocked again.  "Hacker lab keys," I said, opening the door into an empty room.  There, on the desk, was the pile of dating forms, neatly stacked and waiting to be fed into the nearby scanner.

It took me less than a minute to hunt through the eager hopefuls for Brauer.  She had filled her form in after all, like a good girl.  I took out my spare form, and started copying.  Within less than a minute, the answers on both sheets matched perfectly.  I put the copied form in the middle of the pile and stuck the old one in my pocket.  I smiled, knowing that I had a 100 percent match.  Even Roper's amateur Pascal algorithms couldn't mangle that.

I heard a door swing shut down the corridor, and I just had time to change Holbrook's form, altering his favorite pastime from literature to cookery, before I heard footsteps, and legged it out through the door.  I sat on a chair outside the office for about five seconds before Mrs. Polyester bustled through the door and noticed me.

I handed her the keys, my face as straight as I could make it, then went outside.  At the exit, I bounded down the steps, and then headed to English class, nearly tripping over Stanton, who was sitting on the floor outside the classroom, doing his English homework.  I sat down and started copying off him, changing every third word.  I must have been grinning, because Stanton gave me a suspicious look.

But I didn't tell him anything.  Not that I didn't trust him.  I didn't want to spoil the fun.  I had pulled off The Great Date Hack.  Now all I had to do was sit back and watch it play out.

The results of the dating program were to be posted before lunch on the following Friday and so, on that day, I followed the multitude as it streamed towards the notice board.  I was just thinking about how long it would be before I confessed the truth about my hack to my fellow lab inmates, when I looked up and saw Brauer coming around the corner, flanked, as usual, by two of her also-rans.

I watched as they noticed me, but instead of getting the expected haute couture sneer in triplet, the two girls did a synchronized glance at Brauer, whose face had gotten a sort of nymph-startled-while-bathing look, and for a frozen millisecond it all looked like the front cover of Vogue Magazine, maybe the Winter Hats and Scarves Special Edition.  I mean, it was hard not to stare.  Then they all quickly resumed the familiar end-of-the-catwalk expression, and strutted past.  So, Brauer and her followers had seen the board and knew the result, that much was clear.  But why the odd look?  I guessed that it was just unexpected.

At the door, I turned my head to see some kid going into a mock faint as beautiful Brauer passed him by, and then I went inside.  I made my way to the notice board, and already in the hallway I thought that I could see people looking at me.  Who would have suspected that this welfare-class underachiever would be a perfect match for the Brauer babe?

I weaved my way through the pack of students crowding the notice board and began to look down the list for my name.  There it was, and next to it, for all the school to see: Oh, look, it's... Ann Vale.

I shook my head.  Had I inhaled poisonous mushroom spores and was I hallucinating?  I stuck my finger under the letters and traced across.  It did not say "Claudia Brauer."  It said "Ann Vale."  But I had a perfect match!  It took my brain a few seconds to work it out before I realized what had happened.  Someone had reshuffled my stacked deck.  I had been hacked.  What the hell?

I stood there, swaying slightly, vaguely aware that other people were looking at me.  Someone put their hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see a huge grin.  "How's Ann?" said a voice.  Expletive deleted.  I mean, with my hyperactivity, or whatever it was, I was never going to get the pick of the girls.  But Ann Vale?  She had a rep that was the punch line of a dozen locker-room jokes.  I went outside for some cold air and sat on a wall - the low one, in case I fell off - trying to work it out.  It is a funny feeling finding out that the people you have been conning have actually been conning you.

Parents: Is your son a computer hacker?

Oh, him?  He couldn't break into a LEGO house.

I went through the rest of the day, taking flak about Vale, and when the final bell went, I walked home and sat in my room without the lights on.  Hello, Darkness, my old friend.

I did go to the school dance, but not for long.  A few of the lab rats were there, and most of the lamers, but they soon disappeared into a crowd of students who were nothing if not future Ropers.  Brauer was a no-show, and after one dance with Walker, I spotted a couple of familiar metal-heads being ejected, and I joined them.  Outside, it was freezing cold.  We smoked and drank and laughed about how the wallflowers were dancing with each other, and I got the usual questions asking if I could get hold of pirated software, and I gave the usual answer: I'll see what I can do.  But in the back of my mind, I was still trying to figure out The Great Date Hack That Never Was.

After the mind-numbing boredom of the holidays, I came back with my batteries recharged and I was actually glad I hadn't quit my job.  At lunch that day, I opened the lab door, powered on the machines, and sat back in my chair, thinking things over.  Stanton came in.

"Where's Roper?'

"Dunno."

He made some remark about Roper probably being busy writing a book, and that it was probably titled The Teacher's Conspiracy Theory: How The Bad Kids Ruin It For The Rest of Them, and then one of the metal-work teachers walked in, interrupting the conversation.  He said that he had dropped in to "see how things were going," and after a few minutes, he casually mentioned that he was thinking of upgrading his home computer, and did I have a spare copy of the latest Microsoft Office installation disk?

I'll see what I can do.

After he left, I must have been staring off into space again because Stanton mentioned my quietness and said that I had been acting strange lately.  He started formulating theories, and I eventually confessed what had happened.  He sat and listened, nodding now and then, as I explained all about the idea for the hack, and how I had arranged a date with Brauer.

"What do you think?" I asked.

He laughed, patted me on the shoulder, and said that I had been geeking out too much, and that I should occasionally go outside to get some fresh air.  Then he launched into his latest conspiracy theory, tying it in with all the other stuff I had heard a dozen times before: Microsoft encryption back-doors, Area 51, and the Giza power plant.  I nodded, encouragingly, but then you can't be involved in a conspiracy, even a small town one, and not start to believe.

Hanlon and a few other misfits drifted in, and with Roper absent for whatever unknown reason, the quiet conversation about computers soon turned into a friendly argument about the end-of-term Friday frag that Hanlon was planning to set up.  I looked at the clock, and noticed that it was nearly end of lunch.

"Closing in five minutes.  Save it, or lose it," I announced, a bit more casual with Roper not around.  "The white zone is for loading and unloading only.  No parking in the red zone," Hanlon mimicked, to everyone's amusement.

"Where's Anne" said Holbrook to me, trying to resurrect the Vale joke.  I ignored him, and Logan said he'd heard one of her boyfriends had won the who-can-make-the-biggest-dent-in-the-sportshall-door-with-their-head competition, and we laughed, and then all went back to arguing about what games to play, and how to keep Roper away from the lab.

There were half a dozen people, and half a dozen different opinions, and I looked around the room at the assembled nerds.  True, we were just young and naive geeks, and our marginal hacks were nothing but kid's stuff.  But in our own minds at least, they were trial runs for future rebellions, conspiracies against the man - who didn't understand computers and who might just lock us out of the technological future... if we let him.

Holbrook jumped in, telling us how the frag would never happen, and as he poured his poison into us, I sat there wondering if this was what Roper felt about me.  After a minute, Hanlon told him to shut up, and Stanton deftly changed the subject to alien astronauts, and the moon-base cover-up, which was good for a laugh.

Anyway, I wasn't really listening to any of it; I was thinking about that look on Brauer's face.  She had known about Bloom and Roper's dating ruse, that much I was sure of.  How much she had known, and how involved - or even why - I had no way to know.  But the way I figured it, she owed me a date.  Of course, there was just no way it would ever happen.  Me and Brauer?  The idea was crazy.

Then again, I couldn't see any reason not to at least check it out.